Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/07/06/blender-make-transparent-spaceship-bubble-canopy/

More and more like a proper spaceship.

Progress with the Blender spaceship. Now you can see inside through the transparent bubble canopy. I  must admit that, although I have made things transparent using Blender before, I couldn’t quite remember how to do it again.

lots of spaceship complexity

It turns out that there is one tiny button that needs to be pressed to make things transparent. Of course before you can push the button you have to move a slider, switch on two extra panels full of controls and set those, oh and make sure you are using the right lights. But after you have done all that it’s really quite simple.

I followed the tutorial at the Blender wiki here. It took a little while to find this link, and it wasn’t till I went to the old dependable blenderartists.org that I ended up on the right track.

Looks like a pimple, but it's where the spacepilot sees out.

Pushing all the buttons and sliding all the sliders enables raytracing, which makes the model looka whole lot better, but it also means that it takes three or four times as long to render. Even these little 500 x 500 pixel images that I’m rendering to illustrate the blog and keep everyone at the Vega Strike forums up to date with the progress of the spaceship are now taking something like 20 minutes to render.

Of course now that the spaceship has a see-through canopy it means that it needs at least the suggestion of a pilot peeping out through it.

Edit. And here he is.

pilot in spaceship